A man dressed in formal Emirati wear stands beside a Bugatti Veyron. This might seem like a common UAE scene, but both figure and car are dwarfed by a stack of playing cards, one of them upright. In another image, tiny folk lounge around a pool created by the screen saver on a BlackBerry phone, the prongs of an electric plug doubling as diving boards.
This is Omar Maree Humaid’s little world, which he started on Instagram in 2011 and now has more than 51,000 followers.
The 34-year-old Emirati, who works for Abu Dhabi Police, creates elaborate “sets” featuring miniature toy figurines (the kind that are usually sold with model railway sets), which he then captures using macrophotography. It takes at least three or four hours to create each scene and shoot it.
[ Click here to see a photo gallery of his work ]
Initially, Humaid bought the figurines from Japan, but eventually located the makers’ factory in Germany and now buys them from the source. Many of his images are representative of his country. For example, when Ramadan began, he put figures of a horse and a kandura-clad man atop a pile of dates, with a caption in Arabic wishing all his followers a blessed month. The Arab models in his work are special commissions and each takes up to two months to make.
“My main focus is the UAE,” explains Humaid. “I want to expose our traditions to the outside world and show how we live, what food we eat and even what wildlife we have here.”
“I love the challenge of it,” he adds. “All photographers choose their style and for me, macro is my passion. When I first saw these miniatures on a video online, I realised that this was something new for us in the Gulf region, so I started trying to find them and my interest grew from there.”
On his regular posts on Instagram, Humaid puts witty captions on the images. But his work can also be serious, such as the image captioned “Life is short”, which shows a mother tending to a baby, a battery separating them from a man being laid out on a stretcher on the other side. In another, a man with a rifle stands on top of a pencil and takes aim at a flying bird. The caption says he is hunting pigeon but Humaid has a deeper explanation.
“In my world, the honest people are represented by the white pigeon and the man shooting them is the enemy. All around us, every day, honest and good people are being killed. This is what I want to say with this image.”
Fresh and clever, Humaid’s work has become popular with clients such as Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, Abu Dhabi Police, Dewa and Etisalat, who have commissioned him to take photographs for their campaigns.
He now wants to encourage others to get into the hobby. “I would love to promote these kinds of photography techniques in universities, colleges and schools. There are very few people doing it and there is so much potential. It would be wonderful if more people were involved.
“But you certainly need to have the patience for this work,” he adds. “And I really love it. With these figures, you can put across any idea that you can imagine.”
aseaman@thenational.ae
